Post Tagged with: "Literature"

Debrecen / Watercolour painting by Miklós Fülöp.

Proemcards from Hungary (Part 5)

Proemcards by Montreal author Endre Farkas – a combination of prose, poetry and reflections on a journey to Hungary after having fled decades ago – concludes with this final installment, which is a continuation from Part 4, Part 3, Part 2 and Part 1. * 14. It was 38 degrees Celsius today, hot enough to make you hallucinate. It was […]

by · January 24, 2016 · Culture
Withering heat in Budapest. Photo: C. Adam.

Proemcards from Hungary (Part 4)

Proemcards by Montreal author Endre Farkas – a combination of prose, poetry and reflections on a journey to Hungary after having fled decades ago – continues from Part 3, Part 2 and Part 1. * 11. In the 1970s, when I was just starting to write poetry seriously, (seriously, as only a young writer starting to write can) I returned to Hungary. While I was […]

by · January 9, 2016 · Culture
Péter Esterházy

Get well, Péter Esterházy!

Recently Hungarian author Péter Esterházy announced in the literary weekly Élet és Irodalom that he is suffering from pancreatic cancer. The country’s literature loving public was shocked, although there had been speculations about his health after he cancelled his appearance at the Goteborg Book Fair in Sweden. The 65 years old writer’s works are well-known in Hungary and his books […]

by · December 11, 2015 · Culture
István Örkény in the late sixties, with his wife Zsuzsa Radnóti.

István Örkény: Professors before the bench

Twentieth century Hungarian author István Örkény (1912-1979) was known for his bitingly sharp social commentary. As a Hungarian Jew, he survived the Holocaust and served in one of Hungary’s forced labour units during World War II, only to be captured by the Russians in 1943. István Örkény spent over two years in a Soviet labour camp, before being allowed to […]

by · August 24, 2015 · Culture
József Attila with his partner Márta Vágó (circa 1928).

Attila József: A fine summer evening (translated by John Bátki)

John Bátki’s 1997 anthology of translated Attila József poems is one of the many books that I bought in a small handful of English and foreign-language bookstores in Budapest’s city centre during the 1990’s. I always spoke Hungarian fluently, yet as a teenager born in Canada, but living within the relatively large expat community of Hungary’s capital, I found Hungarian […]

by · July 5, 2015 · Culture